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Monthly Archives: April 2011

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Server Update Caused Submission Failures

Yesterday there was some performance problems on the server and I contacted our host about it who updated a few things. In the process they managed to overwrite some files that allow our engine to run through proxy servers which means that all the submissions from about 3pm yesterday failed. Luckily we have a re-scheduling system in place so most of these will be retried.

We have now stopped the engine and as soon as the overwritten files have been restored we can re-start it. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Fast Submission Speeds Modified

We used to have just 3 submission speeds – all links in a single day, one link per day and one every 3 days. However with the increasing number of supported sites we’ve needed to alter this a little.

Pro members have a 4th option which is 5 links per day but we have also now modified the fastest option to change dynamically based on the number of submission targets for that job type. So rather than blindly submitting all links in a single day which could be a bit too much, it will submit a maximum of 30 per day for each particular job and will modify the number of days accordingly.

So for Directories and RSS feeds there are less than 30 sites so these remain as before – all in a single day. For Bookmarks, these are split over 2 days (it’s still just 1 for Free members as only 15 links go out), and for Articles these are now spread over 3 days. This is dynamic so alters itself as the number of supported sites changes.

We’ll be updating the training materials to reflect the change in due course.

Major Changes to the Spam Filtering Functionality

We added some spam filtering code quite some time ago but it went fairly unnoticed by most members due to the fairly subtle way in which it was implemented. When a job is flagged as spam it will not be submitted and a submission error is recorded which explains that the job was flagged as spam. However, unless a member specifically clicked on the details of the job to see the error message, they would never know about it.

As well as marking the job as spam, a spam warning is registered against the member but until now that value was ignored. In today’s update, if you have any spam warnings against your account you will not be able to submit any new jobs until you have cleared the warnings. You’ll be presented with a form with a link to our acceptable content guidelines and a check box to tick stating that you understand the guidelines.

When you submit the form, the warnings are reset and you can continue using the site as normal. Note that any jobs marked as spam are still marked as such, but your actual account is now usable. If a member submits spam content 3 times their account and all of their jobs will be deleted! Of course, a clear warning is given when the 2nd breach has been recorded so there can be no ‘accidental’ deletion.

Vote for Spinning Support Method

Currently when you submit a job to IMAutomator, it submits exactly the same copy of that job to each site. We now wish to implement a form of spinning to allow you to vary the details that get submitted to the individual sites. However, there are a couple of ways we could implement this, here are the two options:

1) Spintax – this would allow you to use spintax inside of the supported fields to create { multiple | several } unique versions of that text. The main advantage is that it can create many versions but the downsides are that it takes skill and effort to setup, and can produce unreadable results.

2) Text Rotation – the simpler option would allow you to enter in multiple versions of the text and the submitter would just rotate around them. This is very easy to use but cumbersome if you want more than a handful of versions. Note that using this method, Articles will be handled in a special way: we will implement a paragraph rotation system that would be able to create dozens of unique and perfectly readable versions of your article from a small number (eg 3) of versions of your original article. So you’d submit 3 versions of your article and IMAutomator would be able to generate many unique versions from those.

New Article Preview Feature

On the article submission form you will now see a new button to the right of the submit button labeled ‘Preview Article’. This will then show you a rendered preview of how your article might look when posted in an article directory. It will show the formatting such as bold and italic text, show embedded links etc. It shows the title, the article body and the resource box. When you’re done, just hit the continue button to go back to the submission form.

50 Bookmark Sites Now with 15 at PR4+

The bookmarking tool is by far our most popular but keeping the list of supported sites strong can be difficult as so many sites shut down just as quickly as they popup. We’ve now started building our own high PR, dofollow bookmarking sites to use in addition to incorporating other higher PR sites.

Today we’ve put in our 50th site and out of those 50, a whopping 15 of them are PR4 or higher. Check it out:

Diigo [PR 7] – http://www.diigo.com/

Alltagz [PR 6] – http://www.alltagz.de/

Argenweb Bookmarks [PR 5] – http://www.argenweb.us/

Dropjack [PR 5] – http://www.dropjack.com/

SoForce [PR 5] – http://soforce.com/

Sugar Symposium [PR 5] – http://www.sugarsymposium.net/

Sweetener Symposium [PR 5] – http://www.sweetenersymposium.org/

Tagza [PR 5] – http://tagza.com/

URL.ORGanizer [PR 5] – http://url.org/

You Strip Bookmarks [PR 5] – http://www.you-strip.com/

IM Translation Links [PR 4] – http://www.im-translation.net/

Matamosa Tuvieja Links [PR 4] – http://www.matamosatuvieja.com/

Online NAMeeting Links [PR 4] – http://www.onlinenameeting.com/

Revenue Workshop Links [PR 4] – http://www.revenueworkshops.com/

Rolegame Bookmarks [PR 4] – http://www.rolegames.info/

HUGE Article Directory Increase – Now 80 Sites!

We have put a huge number of Article directories today bringing the total up to 80! That’s more than treble what we had before! We still have a load more we can add but we’ll be taking a break from those for a little while to work on some other stuff.

As mentioned in the last post, if you’ve not been using the Secondary Submissions feature yet, now is the time to start. Most article submissions will have had around 30 submissions so there are another around another 50 backlinks to be had from all the new directories added today. The Secondary Submissions tool works with all job types – not just bookmarks so go grab yourself a few hundred (or thousand!) extra backlinks! 🙂

Secondary Submissions Bugs Ironed Out

The Secondary Submissions tool is one of the best ones in the IMAutomator suite for Pro members as it allows you to continue to pick up new backlinks for all your previous submissions when we add new sites; but it has been a bit buggy. This week we have been re-working it and found two bugs which would have caused the following problems: Firstly, sometimes the count of submissions still to do would not count down to 0 properly so the report would not reset and it would appear to be in limbo. The only way around that was to cancel the current batch and schedule a new one. However a second bug was found in the cancellation function which caused the submission record to sometimes be lost causing the same submissions to be scheduled all over again!

Both of these bugs have been fixed now and the tool should be working properly. We are currently in the middle of a huge site support effort so now is a good time to start using the Secondary Submissions tool to start racking up a lot of extra backlinks! If you’re not familiar with it, please refer to the resources on our training page.

Article submission now controlled by word count

Following on from the previous post, we have now modified the submission process for articles to allow the number of words in the article body to control just where that article will be submitted to.

Currently we have 26 article sites in the system, 24 of which require just the minimum of 300 words but we have one that requires 400 and another that requires 500. Now when you submit an article you will see some text under the article body telling you how many sites will be submitted to for the various word count threshold.

When you click the submit button the submission schedule is created but it will now take the word count of your article into account. So if you submit an article of between 300 and 399 words it will go to just 24 of the 26 sites.

Previously we had deliberately not added certain article sites because we felt they were too demanding for the majority of members. However, some members write longer articles so this feature allows us to cater both for the masses and also for those who wish to make the effort to write longer articles.

For existing articles added before this feature, we have simply marked them as having 500 words so they will continue to be submitted to the full schedule as before. If you edit the article the word count will be updated but the submission schedule will not change as this is only built at the point of job creation. Note that it is not a disaster if a shorter article is submitted to a site that wants more – it just means it will be rejected by that particular site.

Article Word Count Added

We’ve added a box that displays the current article word count to the article submission form. This will update as you type / paste in. When submitting the article, the minimum length for the article body is now 300 words rather than a number of characters. Next to the word count box there is a summary line telling you how many sites you can select based on the number of words entered. For example:

300w: 14 sites, 400w: 19 sites, 500w: 27 sites, 600w: 29 sites

This indicates that a 300 word article can be submitted to only 14 sites, if your article is 400 words you can select 19, increase it to 500 and you have 27 available and to be able to select them all you’d need to write 600 words and that would allow 29 sites to be selected.

Color Coding for Article Word Count Site Requirements

To make our submission form display all of the pertinent information without being too busy, we’ve introduced a color coding system. We’ve used coloring in a number of areas:

The summary line demonstrated above

The site selection area of the submission form

The supported sites list

The colors are as follows:

Black text – 300 words

Blue text – 400 words

Orange text – 500 words

Pink text – 600 words

Hopefully this will make it a little easier to pick the correct sites for your article.

Important note: the site selection boxes do not restrict which sites you can select based on article word count so if you input an article that has around 350 words and you select sites that require 400 words or more, those submissions will fail so please only select sites for which your articles are long enough!